The Navy Can’t Afford $1 Million ‘Smart’ Shells for Its $4 Billion Battleships

Meanwhile, its ultra-versatile new $440 million warship is frozen to a dock in Canada.

The US Navy’s ultra-versatile new $440 million warship might have to ride out the rest of winter frozen to a dock in Canada. But the sailing branch says it expects to formally accept a new 610-foot-long vessel into service in the coming weeks, its second Zumwalt-class stealth battleship.

The catch? Its main weapons don’t have any ammunition. And possibly never will.

The future USS Michael Monsoor, which was nearing completion at Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine in mid January, is the second in a three-ship class of high-tech vessels with hard-to-detect downward-sloping hulls, a huge flight deck for helicopters and drones, and a sophisticated on-board computer network. Each ship, named after a Navy SEAL who died in Iraq in 2006, costs around $4 billion, not including the $10 billion the Navy spent on research and development for the class, according to the Congressional Research Service. The sailing branch was originally slated to buy as many as 32 of the new ships, but ultimately cut the planned production run to just three owing to the high per-vessel cost.